‌Chapter 7

‌Mistresses, Bastards and Maris complaisants

With their extramarital dalliances, Kings Carl XVI Gustaf, Juan Carlos and Albert II were following a long-established practice. Traditionally, royal marriages were not about love, lust or friendship – they were instead about producing heirs and cementing alliances, and were carefully arranged by parents and ministers. It is because of the usefulness of the royal marriage as a tool of foreign policy that unions were invariably with those from other countries – even if, as the experience of the First World War showed, it was perfectly possible for countries linked by close family ties to go to war against each other.

When the future King George VI, the father of Queen Elizabeth II, married Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in April 1923, she became the first Briton to make a legitimate marriage to a prince of the royal house since Anne Hyde became James II’s first wife in 1659. The Continental monarchies have clung even longer to the tradition of seeking wives and husbands abroad – often in Germany. The future King Harald V of Norway’s marriage to Sonja Haraldsen in 1968 made him the first future head of a Scandinavian nation to choose a compatriot. Crown Prince Philippe of Belgium’s wedding to Mathilde d’Udekem d’Acoz just over thirty years later was the first domestic match involving the heir to the throne of one of the three Benelux monarchies.

With so much at stake, relatively little attention was traditionally paid to the personal suitability of the couple – which in the Middle Ages, at least, would lead to some bizarre matches. Take Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the two princes murdered in the Tower of London. He was already a widower when he disappeared at the age of ten in 1483; he had been betrothed to Anne de Mowbray, a rich heiress, when he was four and she was five.

In the days before photography, the potential for disappointment presented by such long-distance unions was considerable. England’s Henry VIII was dismayed when he caught his first glimpse of the German-born Anne of Cleves, destined to become his fourth wife. When the King went to the water’s edge to meet her on 3rd January 1540, he discovered she looked little like the portrait that Hans Holbein, the court’s most prominent artist, had painted of her. By then, however, it was too late to call off the union with a woman whom he dubbed his “Flanders mare”. “If it were not that she had come so far into my realm, and the great preparations and state that my people have made for her, and for fear of making a ruffle in the world and of driving her brother into the arms of the Emperor and the French king, I would not marry her,” Henry complained. “But now it is too far ‌gone, wherefore I am sorry.”1 He claimed he could not consummate the marriage because he “could not overcome his loathsomeness” of her “nor in her company be provoked or stirred to the Act”. At Henry’s instigation, the marriage was annulled, but Anne received a generous settlement including Richmond Palace and Hever Castle, home of Henry’s former in-laws, the Boleyns, and became known as “the King’s Beloved Sister”. And, unlike Anne Boleyn and Kathryn Howard, she also kept her head.

In many cases, a royal couple would marry “by proxy” before even meeting at all. Under a curious procedure that endured until the nineteenth century, each would separately undergo a marriage ceremony in their home country in which a stand-in, usually a relative, would play the part of the spouse to be. The “couple” would even go to bed afterwards, although there was a limit: the union would be deemed to have been consummated once their feet had touched. As well as preventing any last-minute hitches, this would ensure the bride’s honour was protected, since she would be travelling abroad as a married rather than a single woman.

The practice was famously depicted in Rubens’s painting, The Wedding by Proxy of Marie de’ Medici to King Henri IV (1622–25), which shows the marriage of the Florentine princess to the French King, which took place in the cathedral of Florence in 1606. Henri himself is not present – instead it is the bride’s uncle, Grand Duke Ferdinando of Tuscany, who is pictured slipping the ring on Marie’s finger. As late as 1810, when Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria became Napoleon’s second wife, the initial marriage ceremony, held in Vienna, went ahead without him. He did, however, deign to turn up for a second ceremony held three weeks afterwards in the chapel of the Louvre.

Even without such a ceremony, parental pressure was such that bride and groom would do their duty. If the two felt some kind of attraction to their spouse to be, then this was a bonus. Indifference, dislike or even physical revulsion were not reason enough to abandon the process.

With marriages viewed this way, it is no surprise that the bride and groom were individually interchangeable. Take the case of Princess Dagmar, the brown-eyed second daughter of Christian IX of Denmark. Having set himself the task of finding his children partners in Europe’s most important dynasties, Christian wanted Dagmar to marry into the Tsar’s family. The Russians, keen for an alternative to the all too common German option, were in favour of the match too. Tsarevich Nicholas seemed the perfect husband.

The young heir to the Russian throne had been given a photograph of the girl destined to be his bride when he was just twelve. Fortunately for their families, he and Dagmar hit it off when he travelled to Copenhagen to meet her. In 1864, when Dagmar was sixteen and Nicholas – or Nixa as she called him – was twenty, they were betrothed. Dagmar prepared herself for her future role, learning her future husband’s language by reading Hans Christian Andersen in Russian.

In April the following year, tragedy struck: while Nixa was holidaying in the south of France at the Tsar’s villa in Nice, he was struck down with meningitis. When Dagmar received a telegram from his father saying he was being given the last rites, she rushed to Frankfurt where she met the Tsar. Together they travelled on the Russian leader’s special train at high speed; Emperor Napoleon III ordered all the normal services off the track to speed their passage southwards.

A small matter such as death could not be allowed to stand in the way of such dynastic considerations, however, and so it was decided to marry the unfortunate princess to Nixa’s younger brother, the future Tsar Alexander III instead. After a year of mourning, he travelled to Denmark and, three weeks later, proposed.

A bear of a man who had shocked his parents by bending the family silver, Alexander was very different from his intellectual elder brother. He would not have been Dagmar’s choice, but she did as she was told and, in November 1866, after converting to Russian Orthodoxy and taking the name of Maria Fyodorovna, she married him in the Imperial Chapel of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. She went on to bear him six children, including the future Tsar Nicholas II, and became Tsarina in 1881 after her father-in-law Alexander II was mortally wounded by a terrorist bomb.

Fear of a similar assassination attempt against her husband was to oblige Maria Fyodorovna and Alexander III to move thirty miles away from St Petersburg to a palace in Gatchina, considered more secure. Respite from such fears came every summer when they travelled to the more relaxed atmosphere of Denmark for family gatherings; they made the journey on board one of the royal yachts, accompanied by more than a hundred courtiers, large amounts of baggage and a cow to provide milk for the children along the way.

There was a happier outcome for Princess Mary of Teck, a British-born minor royal of German descent, who found herself in the same unfortunate situation as Dagmar almost three decades later. The Princess, known to her family as May, was betrothed in December 1891 at the age of twenty-four to her second cousin, once removed, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, the eldest son of the future Edward VII and Alexandra. The Prince – known to his family as Eddy, was expected one day to become king. But he was also a sleazy character who frequented prostitutes of both sexes and had a penchant for the low life: rumours circulated that he was associated with – or even was – Jack the Ripper, the notorious serial killer blamed for a series of brutal murders in the impoverished East End of London in the late 1880s.

Six weeks after their engagement was announced, Eddy died unexpectedly of pneumonia. For the royal family she was too good a catch to miss and so, the following year, May became engaged to Eddy’s younger brother, the future George V. They were to remain happily married until his death more than forty years later.

A few other royal marriages, although arranged, also turned into genuine love matches – most notably Queen Victoria’s union with Albert. The attraction was not just physical, but also intellectual. When Albert died of typhoid fever in 1861 at the age of just forty-two, Victoria was devastated and wore black for the rest of her life. Her grandfather George III too had been devoted to his wife, Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, whom he met for the first time on their wedding day, in 1761 – the year after he became king. They remained married – happily by all accounts, apart from George’s later bouts of madness – until her death in November 1818, and she bore him no fewer than fifteen children.

These were the exceptions, however: many other royal unions quickly degenerated into indifference or downright dislike. Even so, few had got off to quite as disastrous a start as that between Victoria’s uncle, the future George IV, and Princess Caroline of Brunswick in 1795 – not least because he was already married to Maria Anne Fitzherbert, a beautiful twice-widowed Roman Catholic, with whom he had fallen in love at the age of twenty-one a decade earlier.

The Prince, believed to have lost his virginity with one of the Queen’s maids of honour when he was sixteen, quickly acquired a reputation for philandering that clung to him throughout his life. In the spring of 1779, at the age of seventeen, he fell passionately in love first with Mary Hamilton, one of his sister’s ladies-in-waiting, who was six years his senior; then, more scandalously, with Mary Robinson, a married actress with whom he became infatuated after he saw her appear as Perdita in A Winter’s Tale at Drury Lane.

His father, George III, was appalled, not least because his son’s dalliances were calling into question the monarchy’s reputation for moral probity. “Your love of dissipation has for some months been with enough ill nature trumpeted in the public papers,” he declared on his son’s eighteenth birthday. For that reason, when George was given his own residence in 1780, he was required to continue living with his parents so they could keep an eye on him.

The tactic failed badly. Despite being kept under a virtual curfew, the Prince proved adept at evading those trying to watch over him. By the summer of the following year he had been seen “riding like a madman” in Hyde Park, been involved in drunken brawls at Vauxhall and Ranelagh Gardens and ‌seduced a number of women.2 He also embarked on another ill-advised affair with a married woman, this time with Countess von Hardenberg, the wife of a Hanoverian diplomat, who began to talk of “running away together”. George was tempted, but when he confided in his mother she had her husband send the von Hardenbergs back to Germany, where the Countess then tried her luck with George’s younger brother, Prince Frederick.

Then George met Mrs Fitzherbert, who like Mary Hamilton was six years his senior. It was love at first sight – at least on the part of the Prince, who pursued her relentlessly, on one occasion stabbing himself to draw blood and having her brought to him so she could see his state of despair. George, who appears to have been genuinely in love, realized the only way to have his way with her was to marry – which was triply problematic: Mrs Fitzherbert was a commoner, and thus unsuitable by tradition; she was a Roman Catholic, but the Act of Settlement of 1701 stated that the heir apparent would forfeit his right to the crown if he married a follower of Rome; and, under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, every marriage contracted by a member of the royal family under the age of twenty-five without the King’s consent was invalid. George was just twenty-three.

He was undaunted, however, and on 15th December 1785 they wed secretly in the drawing room of her home in Park Lane. The service was conducted by Robert Butt, a one-time vicar of Twickenham who was in prison for debt and who agreed to do the deed in return for his discharge. They left afterwards for a honeymoon at Ormeley Lodge, near Richmond.

The couple made a token attempt to keep their marriage secret: rather than move in with George, Mrs Fitzherbert rented a house nearby. Rumours spread about their relationship, however, and they increasingly lived together as man and wife. And so it might well have continued, had it not been for the huge debts being run up by the spendthrift Prince. By the early 1790s his finances were in such a parlous state that he was obliged yet again to turn to his father to bail him out. By this time he had also fallen out with Mrs Fitzherbert and had taken Frances, Countess of Jersey, as his mistress. So, in August 1794, George told the King that he was ready to make a suitable marriage, in return for a considerable financial settlement. His cousin, Princess Caroline of Brunswick, six years his junior, was chosen as his bride. The Prince agreed, even though he had never met her.

The match was in part thanks to lobbying by Lady Jersey who, according to one contemporary observer (the Duke of Wellington), had chosen the Princess, a woman of “indelicate manners, indifferent character and not very inviting appearance from the hope that disgust for the wife would ‌secure constancy to the mistress”.3 To further strengthen her own position, the Countess insisted on becoming a lady-in-waiting to the Queen.

When Caroline, a blonde, high-spirited woman who paid little attention to fashion or personal hygiene, arrived at St James’s on 5th April 1795, it was revulsion – rather than love – at first sight on both sides: after giving her the obligatory kiss, George retreated to the corner of the room where he was fortified by a dram of brandy. The wedding ceremony, held on the evening of the 8th in the Chapel Royal of St James’s, proved even more of an ordeal; Caroline, who complained that her husband was “nothing as handsome as his portrait”, claimed afterwards he had been dead drunk for most of the wedding night.

The couple parted company almost immediately after their brief honeymoon – but not before conceiving a daughter, Charlotte, born on 7th January the following year. His duty done, George wrote his wife a letter on 30th April renouncing further cohabitation, and their separation became final.

In the years that followed, the Prince made it difficult for Caroline to see their daughter; exasperated, she left for the Continent, returning to Britain only after George III died in January 1820 and her husband succeeded him. Any hopes that Caroline may have had that she would be welcomed back as his queen were swiftly dashed. George banned her from his coronation, held at Westminster Abbey on 19th July 1821, and when she turned up regardless, she was sent away by prizefighters dressed as pages. This was like a death blow to the unfortunate Caroline: she was taken ill while watching a performance at Drury Lane Theatre a few days later and, to George’s apparent delight, died on 7th August.

In addition to his well-documented liaisons with Fitzherbert and Robinson, and Ladies Jersey, Hertford and Conyngham, George had at least thirteen other mistresses as well as very many other short-lived affairs. Yet Fitzherbert appear to have been the only woman to whom he was ever sincerely attached: when he died in 1830, it was with her portrait around his neck.

Many of George IV’s Continental contemporaries also had unhappy marriages, even if they did not go quite as disastrously wrong as his. An example was Léopold I, the first king of the Belgians. Although devoted to the unfortunate Princess Charlotte and distraught at her death in childbirth, relations were far cooler with his second wife, Louise, daughter of Louis Philippe, the king of France, whom he married, largely out of dynastic considerations, in 1832. Some twenty-two years his junior, the young Princess, who was aged just twenty when they married, found sex with her husband a terrible chore. “I am indifferent to his caresses, and to his familiarity… I put up with them, I allow it to happen, but I find ‌it more repugnant than pleasing.”4 Although this did not prevent the couple from having four children over the following eight years, Léopold sought his pleasure elsewhere.

The marriage of his son, also called Léopold, was even more of a disaster. The Duke of Brabant, as he was known at the time, was most likely still a virgin when his father married him in August 1853 at just eighteen to Marie-Henriette de Habsburg-Lorraine, the daughter of Archduke Joseph of Austria. Again, the motivations were dynastic, but they were a poor match: a tall, scrawny adolescent with a large nose, who was likened somewhat cruelly by some contemporaries to a “stick of asparagus”, the future Léopold II was quiet, solitary and sullen. Beautiful, if a little plump, Marie-Henriette was an extrovert tomboy who loved music, especially wild Gypsy tunes, playing cards and horses, which she rode Magyar-style at great speed.

Léopold would have preferred her elder sister, Elisabeth, but was not given the choice. Writing to his parents from Vienna, he described his future wife as “a bit fat and not very pretty, though without being ugly”. Marie-Henriette, who had been dreaming of a very different Prince Charming, told her half-brother, Stephan, before leaving for Brussels, that she felt “like a nurse going to tend a patient with consumption”. It was, said Madame Metternich, a match between “a stable boy and a nun, the nun ‌being the Duke of Brabant”.5

The marriage got off to a predictably poor start after the couple set up home together in Brussels. Like her mother-in-law before her, Marie-Henriette quickly lost her gaiety and spontaneity. Withdrawing into herself, she established a menagerie of ponies, horses, dogs, parrots and even camels and llamas. “If God hears my prayers, I shall not go on living much longer,” she wrote to a friend in Vienna ‌a month after her marriage.6

The couple’s incompatibility was immediately obvious to all. The Duchess of Dino commented that Marie-Henriette had a “very sad manner”: “I pity also the young Duke, for they are two children ‌who only got married reluctantly.”7 Léopold and Marie-Henriette’s failure to do their duty and produce an heir also became a matter of concern – especially to Queen Victoria, who took an interest in the family. “Leo does not demonstrate the slightest feeling of love or admiration for Marie, or any woman,” she wrote despairingly to the young Prince’s father. To try to improve matters, she had her husband, Albert, write to the future Belgian king to encourage him to be a better husband. In one letter, written in April 1857, almost four years after they had married, he urged the young couple “to love each other with greater ‌passion than displayed so far”.8

It seemed to work: the following February, Marie-Henriette gave birth to the first of four children. Unfortunately, the only boy among them – also named, of course, Léopold – died aged just nine after falling in a pond at Laeken. Léopold was forced to accept that it would be his brother Philippe’s son who would eventually succeed him – and like many monarchs before him, he knew who was to blame: his wife. Marie-Henriette was understandably upset. “What can we do against the will of God?” she asked in a letter ‌to Adrien Goffinet, a confidant.9

Their marriage effectively over, Marie-Henriette, now aged thirty-six, withdrew almost completely from court life, spending most of her time at a house she bought in the health resort of Spa in the Ardennes, where she devoted herself to breeding dogs and horses – and to Pierre Chazal, the minister of war. He was as fond of animals as she was; he had once owned a park with zebras and kept a monkey in his living room – and so presumably did not much mind the smell of animals that observers reported hung around the Queen. After Chazal returned to his native south of France in 1871, he was replaced in her affections by Henri Hardy, the young royal veterinarian, who looked after her when she was ill. “Treat me as if I were a horse,” ‌Marie-Henriette used to tell him.10 The full misery of her life was revealed only in letters published a few weeks after her death in September 1902 in the Neues Wiener Tagblatt and reproduced in the New York Times. “I am an unhappy woman,” she had written in September 1853, just a month after her marriage. “God is my only support. If God will hear my prayer, ‌I will not live longer.”11

There were similar tales of marital woe elsewhere in Europe. Especially unhappy, even by royal standards, was the Dutch king Willem III’s first marriage in June 1839, to his cousin Sophie, daughter of King Wilhelm I of Württemberg and Grand Duchess Catherine Pavlovna of Russia. The problem was not just her husband’s much publicized philandering, which led the New York Times to brand him after his death as “dissolute and lustful” and “the ‌greatest debauchee of the age”,12 but also the fact that, intellectually, Sophie was far superior to the King, who was described by Queen Victoria, with whom she corresponded, as an uneducated farmer. Sophie made this widely known, suggesting she should be regent in his place. Although half-Russian herself, she also had a prickly relationship with her Russian mother-in-law, Anna Pavlovna, who had been completely against the marriage. After bearing her husband three sons – none of whom lived long enough to become king – Sophie tried to separate from him – but was refused permission. From 1855 the couple lived apart and she spent much of her time in Stuttgart with her own family. When Sophie died in 1877, she was buried in her wedding dress, because, in her own view, her life had ended on the day she married.

Willem, by now aged sixty, wasted little time mourning his late wife. A few months after her death, he announced his intention to marry Eléonore d’Ambre, a French opera singer, whom he ennobled as Countess d’Ambroise – without government consent. When the Dutch government objected, he settled instead for Princess Emma of Waldeck and Pyrmont, a small German principality, who was forty-one years his junior. Despite the age difference the marriage appears to have been a happy one, enduring for the remaining eleven years of his life.

While death was, in most cases, the only way of getting rid of an unwanted spouse, divorce, as Henry VIII had shown with two of his wives, was occasionally a solution – at least in Denmark. The future King Christian VIII learnt three years after marrying his cousin, Charlotte Frederikke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, in 1806 that she was having an affair with her voice teacher, the composer Édouard du Puy. Retribution was swift: the marriage was dissolved, and Charlotte Frederikke was banished to Jutland and forbidden from ever seeing her son Frederik again.

The boy, who was to reign as Frederik VII from 1848 until 1863, grew up to have his share of marital difficulties. When he was twenty, long before coming to the throne, he married his second cousin, Vilhelmine, youngest daughter of the then king, Frederik VI. It was not a happy union: he was unfaithful and ruthless towards his wife and finally crossed the line one evening when he got drunk in her bedroom and threatened her. It was too much for the King, who banished him to Jægerspris Castle and demanded a divorce for his daughter. It came through in 1837. Frederik’s second marriage, with Duchess Caroline of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in 1841, was also a failure, ending in divorce five years later. Such divorces were the exception, though; most royal couples remained married, at least in name.

Once a royal marriage had taken place, the aim was clear: to produce a legitimate heir, preferably a male one. The birth itself became an official occasion, governed by its own rules and procedures.

In Britain, following the so-called “warming-pan incident” of 1688, when Mary of Modena, second wife of King James II, was accused of substituting a changeling smuggled in a warming pan for her own stillborn child, a minister of the crown was required to attend all royal births as an independent witness. The practice survived well into the twentieth century and was not abolished until the time of the birth of Prince Charles in 1948.

One son was not enough, especially in those countries – the majority – that did not allow queens regnant. In those days of high infant mortality, several were needed to be sure of producing a male heir who would survive through childhood. Léopold II was not the only king to bury his son and see the throne pass instead through his brother’s line. Carl XV of Sweden and Norway, who reigned from 1859 until 1872, lost his only son Prince Carl Oscar to pneumonia at just fifteen months, after doctors prescribed a cold bath as a cure for his measles. Carl XV was then succeeded by his younger brother, Oscar. His Dutch contemporary, Willem III, meanwhile, buried three sons before siring the future Queen Wilhelmina at the age of sixty-three – even though the rules of succession had to be altered in order to allow a woman to come to the throne.

The most unfortunate was Denmark’s Frederik VI – or rather his wife, Marie Sophie Frederikke of Hesse-Kassel, who bore eight children only to lose six of them as babies. The two who survived were girls and therefore barred from the throne – as were the four children the King had by his mistress, Frederikke Dannemand. So when Frederik died in 1839, he was succeeded by his cousin, Christian VIII.

Once the heir was born and succession assured, most monarchs lived separate lives from their wives, almost certainly sleeping in a different bedroom or even palace. Often a glowering and unhappy presence, she could not be removed without threatening a diplomatic incident with the country of her birth.

Kings would then seek solace in the arms of other women, some of whom then became permanent features at court. The heyday of the mistress was undoubtedly pre-revolutionary France. François I, who ruled from 1515 to 1547, is believed to have been the first monarch to appoint his favourite as maîtresse-en-titre, a quasi-official title that came with expectations of an apartment in the palace, jewels and a steady income. Some of the women who went on to assume the title accumulated considerable power: Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart, better known as Madame de Montespan, was widely considered the true queen of France for the influence that she exerted over Louis XIV in the late 1660s and 1670s – which came to an end when she was accused of involvement in a series of suspicious poisonings. Almost a century later, Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry exerted an equally powerful influence over Louis XV.

Far from a dirty secret, a mistress was an essential trapping of royal life elsewhere in Europe too. Louis XIV’s cousin, Charles II of Britain, was one of the few monarchs to have several mistresses simultaneously – among them Nell Gwynn and Lady Castlemaine – who between them bore him at least a dozen children (while his marriage with Catherine of Braganza of Portugal remained without issue). When Augustus the Strong of Saxony became king of Poland in 1697, he was advised that in order to become a “complete monarch” he should take a mistress in Warsaw to complement the one he already had in Germany. Failure to do so, he was told, would upset his new Polish subjects.

Presumably with Charles’s example in mind, George, the elector of Hanover, brought two mistresses – one tall and thin, the other short and fat, and both surprisingly ugly – with him from Germany when he succeeded to the British throne in 1714. His son, who was to succeed him as George II in 1727, also took a mistress, although more out of a sense of duty than passion. The King, wrote the memoirist Lord Hervey, “seemed to look upon a mistress rather as a necessary appurtenance to his grandeur as a prince than as an addition to his pleasures as a man, and thus only pretended to distinguish what it was evident he overlooked and affected to caress what it was ‌manifest he did not love.”13

By the nineteenth century changing sexual mores meant that such a formal system of mistresses no longer seemed appropriate. Yet princes were still forced by their parents, often at an early age, into a loveless marriage for the sake of the dynasty, and only a few could bring themselves to embrace monogamy completely. A particular favourite for short dalliances were actresses, who were invariably beautiful and often available. And if the relationship became more serious they could be married to a suitable husband in order to provide a veneer of respectability. Other royal males preferred high-born women who were already married.

In both cases the husbands of such royal conquests – who became known as maris complaisants – were required to turn a blind eye to their wife’s extramarital adventures. The reward for playing the cuckold could be a job or an honour or a curious kind of prestige that came from the knowledge among fellow aristocrats that your wife was being bedded by the King. Often, they were simply too busy with their own affairs to be worried about what their wife was up to.

It proved an enduring model. There is no better modern-day example of such a triangle than the romance that Prince Charles carried on with the then Camilla Parker Bowles while he was married to Diana, Princess of Wales, and she to Andrew Parker Bowles. Diana minded considerably, but Parker Bowles, pursing his own relationships with other women, apparently did not.

Léopold I of Belgium took several mistresses, most of them much younger than himself: the most celebrated among them was Arcadie Claret, the beautiful eighteen-year-old daughter of a French army officer whom the King met in 1844 when he was fifty-four. Infatuated with her from the start, Léopold married her to Frédéric Meyer, a young army officer, and installed her in an hôtel de maître in the Rue Royale in Brussels, close to the royal palace.

The King made little attempt to hide his relationship, appearing with his young mistress at the theatre and other events, much to the anger of the Belgian public, who whistled and even pelted the windows of her home in Brussels with rotten vegetables. In November 1849 she bore him a son, who was named Georges-Frédéric – Georges being the King’s second name. Matters became simpler in October the following year when his wife Louise died of tuberculosis, aged just thirty-eight; Léopold could now be more open about his relationship with Arcadie, installing her in the Château du Stuyvenberg near Laeken, which he bought for her. It was here on 25th September that she gave birth to his second child, named Chrétien, Léopold’s third name. When the King died in 1865 after a long illness, the last word he uttered was not Arcadie but Charlotte – although it was not known whether he meant his English first wife or his daughter of the same name.

Léopold’s son, meanwhile, had already started seeking pleasure elsewhere early during his unhappy marriage with the unfortunate Marie-Henriette. Although introduced to carnal pleasures only relatively late, Léopold II soon developed his father’s passion for sex, which vied with his obsession with the Congo and with money. “My nature requires manifold encounters with the fair sex,” he confided to his diary. “I do not ‌understand how clerics can live.”14

Among his many mistresses was Marguerite d’Estève, known as “Margot, the Queen of the Congo”, who kept a salon on Brussels’s prestigious Avenue Louise. There were others in Nice and other fashionable resorts of the time. The King had a particular passion for chambermaids, shop girls and chocolatières, the young women who sold chocolate in salons de thé, all of whom were sent away weighed down with presents.

In later life Léopold was also a frequent visitor to Paris nightclubs, where expensive prostitutes with pseudo-aristocratic names catered to the needs of affluent clients. He was especially fond of Émilienne d’Alençon, who, along with Liane de Pougy and Caroline “La Belle” Otero, were known as the “Trois Grâces” or, more appropriately, the “Grandes Horizontales”. More shocking were the allegations of paedophilia made during a court case in London in 1885. A former servant at a “disorderly house” owned by a Mrs Mary Jeffries testified that the King paid £800 a year for a supply of young virgins, aged ten to fifteen, to be ‌sent to him in Brussels.15 William Stead, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, then wrote a series of articles in which he claimed a hundred girls were sold each year. Mrs Jeffries herself admitted having had a young girl delivered to the royal yacht Alberta when it was moored on the Thames during one of the King’s visits. Léopold did not seem troubled by the affair, which was barely mentioned in the Belgian press.

Then, in the summer of 1900, Léopold began what was to prove a highly controversial relationship with Blanche Delacroix, a young French woman. He was already sixty-five and Blanche just seventeen: he was taken by her youth and beauty; she was dazzled by his wealth and position. She had been living with Antoine-Emmanuel Durrieux, a sea captain eighteen years her senior whom she had met during her voyage from Argentina, where she had been living for the previous few years, but was quick to see the attraction of a royal liaison. Léopold, feeling unloved by his own family and needing someone to nurse him in old age, made her his permanent mistress. He shared his vast fortune with her, showering her with expensive jewels – including a diamond necklace worth 75,000 francs – and properties: he renovated for her Villa Vandenborght, near his palace in Laeken – even building a special walkway over the road to link the grounds of their two homes – and bought her the Villa Caroline, in Ostend, which was connected to his Chalet Royal by an underground tunnel, and the Château de Balincourt, in Arronville in the Val-d’Oise, which had silver bathtubs and a bed adorned with gold under a vast canopy of handmade Belgian lace.

Léopold wooed his young mistress in Cap Ferrat, a spectacularly beautiful but still wild area on the Côte d’Azur, where he bought more than a dozen plots of land after visiting his daughter Clémentine in 1895. It was here in 1902 that he was to build the Villa Léopolda, an extraordinary home whose later owners were to include the Fiat boss Gianni Agnelli and the Jewish-Lebanese financier Edmond Safra – and, after his death in a suspicious fire in Monaco in 1999, his widow Lily.

Far from prying eyes, this was the ideal place for an illicit affair. Léopold installed Blanche in a villa called Radiana, deep in the middle of lush vegetation, where she was effectively his prisoner. Every evening, equipped with a dim lantern, he would make his way to the house along a little path hidden by the trees. Officially he went to play cards, but the gardener of the Léopolda had orders to deliver a basket of fresh flowers every day.

Although Léopold was by now a widower, the relationship earned wide disapproval – and provided fodder for the caricaturists – much as his father’s liaison with Arcadie Claret had done sixty years earlier. Such criticism intensified after Delacroix had two children, both sons: Lucien, born in February 1906, and Philippe, born in October the following year. Whether the King, now aged seventy-two, was actually Philippe’s father is not clear – even though he was encouraged to see that the newborn baby had a deformed hand, something of a hereditary trait of the Coburgs. Blanche was rewarded for the birth of Lucien by being ennobled as the baroness de Vaughan. The two boys were to be treated rather more generously than Delphine Boël would be by King Albert II almost a century later: Lucien became the duke of Tervuren and his younger brother the count of Ravenstein.

By this time Blanche, who had begun to dominate the ageing King, had resumed her relationship with Durrieux, her former boyfriend and pimp; on one occasion Léopold came across the two of them together during a visit to Villa Vandenborght. Blanche tried to explain Durrieux away as his brother. Whether or not Léopold believed her is not clear, but he tolerated the man’s presence near his mistress and at court, prompting Socialist pamphlets to talk of “an indecent triangular relationship”. Catholic opinion was also outraged: on one occasion the King was confronted in Ostend by a priest. “Sire, I have heard rumours that you have a concubine,” he told him. “Good Heavens, Father,” Léopold replied. “I have heard the same rumours about you, but I don’t believe them.”

Léopold contemplated abdicating in favour of his nephew Albert and spending the last of his days with his mistress, whose ennobling had brought more criticism. Then, in December 1909, moments before he had a serious operation on his intestine, which he feared he might not survive, he married Blanche in a secret religious ceremony, with the benediction of Pope Pius X. Léopold was dressed in white; his bride wore a black silk robe. The King called her “ma veuve” (“my widow”).

Such a ceremony – similar to his great-nephew Léopold III’s clandestine wartime marriage to Lilian Baels – may have made it possible for the King to make peace with the clergy, but still did not make Blanche his queen or allow either of their sons to succeed him. That would have required a civil ceremony. In any case, he died just two days after the operation. Nevertheless, Blanche, who remained with him until the end – just as his father’s mistress, Arcadie, had done six decades earlier – still enjoyed a substantial inheritance. The following August she married Durrieux, who had wisely remained in touch and even allowed himself to be registered as the father of her sons. The ceremony was held at the unusual hour of 6.30 in the morning to shake off the paparazzi. They divorced three years later.

There were similar goings-on elsewhere in Europe: Oscar I, who ruled Sweden and Norway from 1844 until his death fifteen years later, effectively led parallel lives. Although initially happily married to his Italian-born queen, Joséphine, who bore him five children in rapid succession, he was unfaithful to her almost from the start – chiefly with Emilie Högquist, a prominent actress whom he set up in a luxurious apartment close to the royal palace. Oscar was said to spend alternate nights with his wife and with Emilie, who bore him two sons – who became jokingly known as “the princes of Laponia” (Lappland). Before marrying, he had fathered another child with a lady-in-waiting to the former queen.

Joséphine, a devout Catholic who risked the displeasure of her husband’s subjects by refusing to convert to Protestantism, was deeply wounded by such infidelity. In her diary she wrote of her bitterness that a woman was expected to suffer a husband’s unfaithfulness “in silence”. Their eldest son, who succeeded Oscar as Carl XV in 1859, shared his father’s predilection for actresses, having a brief affair with Elise Hwasser, the leading theatre star of her age, before moving on to another actress, Hanna Styrell, who had a daughter by him. Carl’s younger brother, who succeeded him as Oscar II in 1872, had similar tastes.

In Britain, the future King Edward VII, a decade Oscar’s junior, notched up an even more impressive record of romantic conquests in his long stint as prince of Wales, earning himself the nickname of Edward the Caresser – much to the lasting displeasure of his mother, Queen Victoria, who contrasted the debauched behaviour of her son, known in the family as Bertie, with the moral probity of her beloved late husband, Albert.

At the insistence of the Queen, who was keen her son should settle down, Edward married in 1863, at the age of just twenty-two, Princess Alexandra, the daughter of the future King Christian IX of Denmark, who was elegant and beautiful but increasingly deaf. In the eight years that followed Alexandra bore him six children, but this did little to prevent the Prince of Wales from seeking his pleasures elsewhere; he was a frequent visitor to Le Chabanais, an exclusive brothel in Paris – one room contained a large copper bathtub with an ornate figurehead, half woman and half swan, in which he liked to bathe in champagne with prostitutes. The increasingly overweight prince also had himself built a special siège d’amour that allowed easy access for oral sex and other forms of entertainment with several partners.

While Le Chabanais was far from the prying eyes of the press, Edward also took a number of mistresses back in Britain – at least thirteen of them, by one count – many of whom were married. Prominent among his early loves were two well-known actresses: the French-born Sarah Bernhardt and the British Lillie Langtry, known as the Jersey Lilly, whose portrait by Millais in 1878 drew crowds to the Royal Academy. Another liaison was with Winston Churchill’s mother, Jennie. In 1889 he met “Daisy” Greville, Countess of Warwick, his “Darling Daisy” and perhaps the first real love of his life, with whom he had a relationship that lasted a decade. Unknown to the Prince, however, the Countess, who was married, was also having an affair with Lord Charles Beresford, Edward’s former aide-de-camp, by whom she became pregnant. When she wrote to the Prince to inform him of this, she was swiftly replaced in his affections by Alice Keppel, twenty-eight years his junior, whose daughter, Sonia, was widely believed to be a product of the relationship.

The discreet Keppel was widely considered a positive influence on Edward, and this continued after he became king in 1901. Such was the enduring nature of their romance that she was with him in Biarritz in March 1910 when he suffered the heart attack that precipitated his death two months later. Although less keen on Keppel than on some of her husband’s other mistresses, Alexandra reluctantly agreed to allow her to Buckingham Palace to take her final leave of him.

A quarter of a century later, on hearing that her late lover’s grandson Edward VIII was renouncing the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, Keppel remarked “things were done much better in my day”. In one of those neat twists of history – or an illustration perhaps of the narrow circles in which royalty moved – Keppel was the great-grandmother of Camilla Parker Bowles.

Alice’s husband, George Keppel, the consummate mari complaisant, appears to have accepted his wife’s liaison with the King, who used to visit their home at teatime when George was out – thereby avoiding potential embarrassment all around. The husbands of his other married mistresses were equally accommodating – with the notable exception of Sir Charles Mordaunt, who arrived home unexpectedly early from a salmon-fishing trip in Norway in summer 1869 to find his twenty-one-year-old wife Harriet entertaining the Prince of Wales at the family seat, Walton Hall, in Warwickshire. The result was an uncomfortable divorce case in which Edward was called as witness – though thankfully not a co-respondent. Even so, it was the first time for centuries that a member of the royal family had been required to give evidence in court.

The naming of the Prince in connection with such a murky affair was immensely damaging – and provided useful fuel for a rapidly emerging republican movement. Harriet’s family, keen to protect their good name, had her certified insane and committed to an asylum, where she spent the remaining thirty-six years of her life. For his part Edward was free to continue his philandering, although he had to endure boos from the crowds and a severe telling-off from his mother.

While Edward VII’s tastes were strictly heterosexual, several kings also took male lovers – though such was the imperative of producing an heir that most also had sex with women, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Willem II of Holland, beaten to the tragic Princess Charlotte of Britain by Léopold I, certainly appears to have been in this category, and in 1819 was blackmailed over what Cornelis van Maanen, the Dutch minister of justice, described as his “shameful and unnatural lusts”.

Even more curious was the case of King Gustaf V, who reigned in Sweden for most of the first half of the twentieth century. Several years after his death in October 1950 came a bizarre postscript: Kurt Haijby, a petty thief who had killed a policemen during a jailbreak, said that in 1912, when he was a fifteen-year-old boy scout, he had been seduced by the King during an audience. Furthermore, Haijby claimed to have been the King’s lover between 1936 and 1947 – a tribute if nothing else to the sexual powers of Gustaf, who would have been in his late eighties at the end of their relationship.

A subsequent investigation found it was not impossible for the incident to have taken place, but that it could not have occurred in the way described by Haijby – at neither the 1912 audience nor another twenty years later had he ever been alone with the King. Intriguingly, though, it emerged that the royal court had paid Haijby one hundred and seventy thousand Swedish kronor for his silence in the 1930s and then, in 1938, after he was arrested for child sex abuse and put into custody at the asylum of Beckomberga, he was offered four hundred kronor a month if he left Sweden and kept quiet about his accusations. Haijby accepted the deal – only to return after the war.

Gustaf’s German-born wife Victoria appears to have had long since given up on her loveless marriage. In the early 1890s she had had an affair with Gustaf von Blixen-Finecke, her husband’s equerry. Later she developed a close relationship with her personal physician Axel Munthe, with whom she ‌used to winter on Capri.16

There were also instances of other, more complicated domestic set-ups – though few could compare with that of Christian VII, who became king of Denmark in 1766, a few weeks before his seventeenth birthday, and lived for a few years in a bizarre ménage à trois with his wife Caroline Matilda, the sister of George III, and her German doctor Johann Friedrich Struensee.

Married a few months after he came to the throne, Christian, who showed early signs of mental instability, exhibited little interest in his wife, preferring a twenty-one-year-old prostitute nicknamed Støvlet-Cathrine (“Boots”-Catherine) with whom he had a number of adventures before she was arrested and deported to Hamburg. Then in 1767, while travelling in the Duchy of Schleswig, he met Struensee, who at thirty was more than a decade his senior. Christian was impressed by the doctor – especially by his ability to cure his hangovers and depression – and brought him back to Copenhagen with the promise of a minor post at court. The dashing German doctor made even more of an impression on Caroline Matilda, becoming her lover, and used his power over the royal couple to become increasingly influential at court. By the summer of 1771 he had acquired dictatorial powers and appointed himself minister of state, whereupon, inspired by the Enlightenment thinkers of the day, he embarked on a programme of reforms intended to modernize Denmark.

Scandalizing opinion, the three of them would often walk or ride in a carriage together and Struensee would eat several times a week with the King and Queen in the royal apartments. To avoid stiff court etiquette, they moved to the palace of Hirschholm, on an island not far from Copenhagen. The King, whose mental state was deteriorating sharply, appeared happy with the arrangement – even after his queen gave birth to a daughter who was almost certainly her lover’s. Their unusual relationship was doomed, however. Struensee’s reforms, although potentially beneficial to Denmark, were often hastily introduced and upset a number of vested interests. The German had also made a powerful enemy in Christian’s stepmother, Queen Juliane Marie, who had one goal in life: ensuring that her own son, Prince Frederik, Christian’s younger half-brother, should one day inherit the throne.

Armed with evidence of Caroline Matilda’s infidelity collected by several of her servants, Juliane Marie organized a group of conspirators, many of them nobles unhappy at Struensee’s reforms. They struck in January 1772 in the early hours of the morning after a masked ball at court, arresting both Struensee and Caroline Matilda. Both lovers were tricked into confessing their adultery: Struensee was sentenced to death and was executed, together with Count Enevold Brandt, one of his allies, at Øster Fælled on 28th April in front of thousands of Copenhageners. Both Struensee and Brandt first had their right hands cut off and then, after the execution, their severed heads were held up for the crowd. Then the bodies were cut into parts and put on wheels, and the heads and hands impaled on stakes.

Caroline Matilda was allowed to live, but barred from seeing her children. She had hoped to return to her native England, but her sister-in-law, Queen Charlotte, refused to welcome back an adulteress and she was sent into exile in a palace in George III’s dominion of Hanover. Christian, unaware of what had happened, demanded to see his wife and friend – only to learn to his horror that he had divorced Caroline Matilda and personally signed Struensee’s death warrant.

Caroline Matilda died in 1775. Nine years later, her son, now sixteen, forced his father to sign a document under which he would become regent, taking from Juliane the powers she had plotted so hard to acquire for herself. He finally came to the throne in 1808 as Frederik VI, going on to become one of the country’s best-loved monarchs.

Complicated marital set-ups seem to have been something of a Danish speciality. After his second divorce, Frederik VII, the next monarch but one, shocked society in 1850, at the age of forty-one, by concluding a morganatic marriage with Louise Rasmussen, a ballet dancer later ennobled as Countess Danner. Their relationship may also not have been entirely what it seemed: both the King and Rasmussen appeared to have been involved in a love triangle with Carl Berling, founder of the newspaper Berlingske Tidende, by whom she had a son. Berling later became chamberlain and all three lived in the palace until 1861. In a further twist it has also been claimed that Frederik, long assumed to have been infertile, actually fathered a son in 1843 by Else Maria Guldborg Pedersen, with whom he had an affair after the breakdown of his first two marriages.

The future King Carlos IV of Spain was also apparently tolerant of the sexual peccadilloes of his wife, Maria Luisa of Parma, who was aged just fourteen when he married her in 1765. She went on to have a series of affairs with courtiers, most notably with Manuel de Godoy, the tall, strongly built son of an aristocratic but impoverished army colonel, who had an enormous appetite for women. Godoy did not confine his attentions to the Queen, however: he married María Teresa de Borbón, the King’s cousin, had a mistress, whom he obliged the Queen to take on as a lady-in-waiting, and embarked on a string of other casual affairs. Maria Luisa made little attempt to hide her relationship with Godoy – baffling contemporary observers. “The thing that must strike those most who watch Carlos IV in the bosom of his court is his blindness where the conduct of the Queen is ‌concerned,” observed the French ambassador.17 The King, it seemed, was almost the only one at court who didn’t recognize the striking resemblance of two of Maria Luisa’s fourteen children to Godoy.

Obsessed with hunting and collecting clocks, Carlos, a timid character dominated by his wife, may simply not have cared. Either way, far from being punished, Godoy was made prime minister, and accompanied the royal couple when they went into exile in France in 1808. Carlos and his wife lived with Godoy, his daughter Carlota Luisa, his mistress Pepita and their sons – although Godoy’s wife, María Teresa, presumably despairing of her husband’s infidelities, had long since left him.

More than a century later, when another Spanish king, Alfonso XIII, the grandfather of Juan Carlos, the current monarch, went into exile, initially in Paris, he became concerned by the closeness of his queen, Victoria Eugenie, to the Duke of Lécera and his wife, the Duchess, thought to be a lesbian. When Victoria Eugenie remonstrated with him over one of his affairs, he taunted her over her relationship with the couple, declaring, “I choose them and never want to ‌see your ugly face again.”18

Queens did not generally enjoy the freedom for such amorous adventures. Few monarchs went quite as far in punishing infidelity as Henry VIII, who executed two of his six wives, but male pride meant it was a rare king who knowingly allowed himself to be cuckolded – even if he was indulging himself with his own mistress. As the case of Struensee showed, a man who dared to lay his hands on the Queen could be severely punished for what was considered treason.

That was certainly the experience of Tsar Peter the Great’s chamberlain, William Mons, who earlier in the eighteenth century was foolish enough to have an affair with Catherine, the Tsarina. Peter was not a man to cross: he had already thrown his first wife, Eudoxia, into a convent and, when she subsequently had an affair, had her tortured and her lover impaled, even though he had long since lost interest in her. When Peter found out what Mons was up to, he had him beheaded – although to preserve the Tsar’s honour the official reason given for his punishment was that he had been caught stealing from state coffers. Peter allowed his wife to keep her freedom but ordered that no one should obey her commands and cut her off from all her funds. Returning to her room on the evening after the execution, Catherine found her late lover’s newly severed head staring at her from a jar ‌of alcohol on her table.19 Fortunately for ‌Catherine, Peter died shortly afterwards.20

Different rules applied to queens regnant, who ruled in their own name rather than owing their titles to marriage. Although, like the men, often forced by parents into unsuitable unions, they were free, as sovereigns in their own right, to take lovers as they wished without fear of punishment. Elizabeth I, England’s “virgin queen”, had several favourites, among them Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester – whom she came close to marrying – and, in later life, his step-son Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, who was more than two decades younger than the Queen.

In Russia, Peter and Catherine’s daughter, Elizabeth, who crowned herself empress in spring 1742 after leading a bloodless revolt with the support of the royal guards, had an eventful love life, complicated by her difficult relationship with her aunt, Anna, who ruled the country from 1730 to 1740. Described as “content only when she was in love”, the young Elizabeth got through a succession of men, among them Alexis Shubin, a handsome sergeant in the Semyonovsky Guards regiment – who was banished to Siberia and had his tongue cut off on Anna’s orders. Elizabeth eventually consoled herself with Alexei Razumovsky, a tall, muscular Ukrainian peasant with a good bass voice who had been brought to St Petersburg by a nobleman for a church choir. Razumovsky, who was a few months older than Elizabeth, was showered with titles and honours and became an increasingly important figure at court; the pair may even have married secretly. This did not prevent the Tsarina from taking other lovers: by the time she reached her forties, she had enjoyed the attentions of several virile young men in their twenties.

This was nothing compared to the sexual antics of Catherine the Great, who disposed of her husband Tsar Peter III after he had spent just six months on the throne and became Tsarina in her own right. The couple had married when they were both still teenagers, but after seven years Catherine was still a virgin. Frustrated, she embarked on an affair with the dashing Count Sergei Saltykov; a series of other lovers followed, chief among them Stanisław August Poniatowski, the Polish count later rewarded with his country’s crown, Gregory Orlov, Alexander Vasilchikov, Gregory Potemkin and Peter Zavadovsky.

By the time she reached her forties, Catherine had reduced the process of finding a suitable lover to a fine art: a potential candidate would first be checked out by a doctor for possible signs of venereal disease; he would then spend a night with Countess Prascovya Bruce, Catherine’s friend and lady-in-waiting, who would act as “éprouveuse”, rating the candidate on his appearance, his sexual technique and the size of his penis. Only those who passed such a stringent test would be passed on to the Tsarina.

Catherine remained sexually active until her death in November 1796, aged sixty-seven. A few years earlier, a barrel-shaped toothless grandmother, she had taken her last lover, Platon Zubov, who, at the age of twenty-two, was thirty-eight years younger than her. “The Empress wears him like ‌a decoration,” noted one observer.21

Nineteenth-century Catholic Spain was a very different country, but this did not prevent Isabel II from playing the field. Although proclaimed queen regent when she was three, on the death of her father, Isabel was not free to choose a husband for herself. Instead, at the age of sixteen, she was obliged to marry her cousin, Don Francisco de Asís de Borbón. Slightly built, with a shrill falsetto voice and an unusual fascination with perfume, jewels and bathing, he was widely assumed to be gay. “What shall I say of a man who on his wedding night wore more lace than ‌I?” the Queen recalled later.22

Understandably, Isabel went on to have a number of lovers, most of them officials and military men, a practice which helped contribute to her political downfall. After ruling for more than thirty years, she was forced to flee to France in 1868 and abdicate. Of her twelve children – only four of whom reached adulthood – few, if any, were thought to have been fathered by her husband. Her son, Alfonso XII, who became king in 1874, for example, was believed to have been the product of a liaison with either Enrique Puigmoltó y Mayans, captain of the Spanish Royal Guard, or General Francisco Serrano. This did not prevent Francisco from holding aloft the infant on a silver salver at each baptism, the traditional gesture of acknowledging ‌the child as his own.23

Given that Isabel was a queen in her own right, the true identity of her heir’s father – at least from a dynastic point of view – was something of an irrelevance. Of more dynastic significance is the curious case of Olav, the only child of King Haakon VII, the Danish prince who went on to found the current Norwegian dynasty, and his English wife, Queen Maud, the daughter of Edward VII. The couple married in 1896, but it was not until seven years later that their only child, the future King Olav, was born – a suspiciously long time given the importance traditionally attached by all royal families to producing an heir.

Various reasons have been given for the delay. Maud certainly spent a lot of time in Sandringham rather than her adoptive homelands of Denmark and then Norway. There were even rumours – put about by republicans – that Haakon was gay. Then in 2004 came another and rather more bizarre explanation: in the second volume of Folket, his voluminous history of the royal couple, Tor Bomann-Larsen, a Norwegian writer, claimed that Olav, who went on to become king in 1957, may not have ‌been Haakon’s son at all.24 The strange assertion was based on examination of the royal couple’s travel records, which Bomann-Larsen said showed that Olav had not been with his wife at the time the baby was thought to have been conceived. The book also claimed that medical records suggested the future king may have contracted a sexually transmitted disease during a particularly “debauched” naval tour to the West Indies, which could have left him sterile.

So who was Olav’s father? Bomann-Larsen claimed Maud might instead have been artificially inseminated – perhaps without her knowledge – with sperm from her Harley Street doctor, Sir Francis Henry Laking, or his son, Guy Francis. Photographs included in the book certainly showed a remarkable resemblance between Olav and the Lakings – and a lack of one between the future monarch and his father. “At the time when the fertilization normally would have taken place, King Haakon was on a marine vessel in Denmark and Queen Maud was lying in hospital in England,” Bomann-Larsen told a news conference to launch the book. “One cannot say precisely who knew what. Maud might ‌not even have known herself.”25

Not everyone was convinced. Odd Arvid Storsveen, a historian at the University of Oslo, claimed in a review of the book published in Historisk Tidsskrift that he couldn’t find adequate evidence for Bomann-Larsen’s hypothesis. “King Olav’s descendants can ‌take it easy,” he declared.26 A spokesman for Norway’s royal family said the King had no information suggesting that Olav had not been Haakon’s son.